At a time when I was running a high fever for weeks, the heat of the blood had scrambled memories, dreams, thoughts and imaginings so that they became present all at once, like images etched on overlapping panes of glass. At any moment, it was hard to be sure what was memory, and what fabulation.

When I first read about the kinship between photography and melancholia, it struck a chord. I remember that as an adolescent I made a deliberate attempt, in the interests of self-preservation, to turn my destructive inward-looking mental forces outwards.

Looking through these old slides, what leaps out is the frequency and variety of failures. Sometimes—although less than I had feared —these are compositional. I had for years before starting photography been drawing, attending life classes, and looking at artists’ drawings, which probably helped. And some of my drawings before photography had a photographic air.

My father rescued this damaged statue from his mother’s garden, where it had been placed under a fountain, so that over the years the water had etched fine rivulets into its stone surface. Standing in our garden beneath a silver birch, and wreathed in holly, it wove its way into the fabric of my childhood…

This project will, I hope, engage those who are interested in the analogue past of photography, in the workings and frailties of memory, in the manner in which photography forms and deforms memory, and—since my photography was always at least partly documentary—in the past that camera and film recorded.